


sound of iron shots (is in my head)

by seaqueen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Sith Revan, darth revan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-18 21:31:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13108914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seaqueen/pseuds/seaqueen
Summary: it began in the quiet moments, in the dust and debris of mortar fire, in the decisions that leave blood on your hands.it began not with a single step but thousands, each as silent as the last until the last vestiges of shore have slipped through your fingers and all that is left is darkness.





	sound of iron shots (is in my head)

> names are a funny thing.
> 
> you don't remember your name.
> 
> you had one, once upon a time when you'd been taken from your family on abraxin. but it was a disappointment and a disgrace to be given to the jedi - the planet is a hard world to survive on. it is swamp and muck, wet and cold and the people of your birth have no use for the force and disdain it and those who use it.
> 
> they give you up and tell the jedi who takes you never to bring you back, that you are no longer their son. to them, you no longer exist and never did.
> 
> and after that - after that you are terrik kothari instead.

 

* * *

  lie awake in bed at night  
**and think about your _life_**

* * *

 

you are two years old when you arrive at the jedi enclave on dantooine, when they put you in initiate robes and tell you that some day you'll be a jedi knight - protector of the republic and enactor of justice throughout the galaxy.

they teach you to run, to fall, to rise, to  _see_  -

they put a lightsaber in your hands and for the first time you feel whole and like you can fly. like there is nothing in the world that can touch you.

there is a great wide galaxy out there beyond the walls of the enclave, beyond the peaceful rolling hills of dantooine. you have only ever known those brief memories of abraxin's swamps and cold and now the farmland and tall grass - there is far more out there and your blood burns to explore it all. the enclave is a small community, housing a bare few hundred jedi to the main coruscanti temple's thousands; but it is there you meet your greatest and lifelong friends.

alek is your age mate, meetra a few years younger but sharp as a tack and always on both of your heels. together the three of you trip into mischief and hijinks and land in front of a stern faced master guiltily more than a few times; and it probably says more than it doesn't that you learn how to avoid getting caught rather than cease.

at eleven years old your master declares she will teach you, take you on as a padawan and your life takes another step forwards. kreia is not an easy master. she routinely poses impossible questions meant to stump you and make you think, to train your mind as much as your body in the arching lines of shien's physicality. there are many who disdain your master's teachings, who claim the historian a heretic and her teachings lunacy instead of the true path of a jedi.

but she is your master nonetheless, and you learn more at her knee than even you realize in those days on coruscant and across the galaxy in mediation and search of history to chronicle.

she is not your only teacher however. master dorak opens your eyes to much of the force's power and to the utilization of those techniques. master zhar teaches you and feeds your endless quest for knowledge; the burning to  _know_. and master kae teaches you mastery of the blade, and the ways through which to turn the entirety of your being into a  _weapon_. it is she who sets your feet on the path of the jedi guardian.

 

* * *

  do you want to be different  
**try to let go of the _truth_**  

* * *

 

sweat slicks your hair to your forehead, errant strands plastered in your eyes as you stumble out of the chamber of trial choking for breathing and fall to your knees - wrung out and left to dry, pounded flat until there's nothing left. but you are  _free_.

the knife is razor sharp where it slides against your skin, the long dark coil of your padawan braid dropping loose into your master's hand, and you bow your head before the council as they proclaim you a knight of the republic and bid you rise as a peer. their faces are ringed around you as you do; some stern and some smiling.

you press the coil, with its achievement beads jewel toned in the light, into master kae's hands and a respectful dip of your head and bow for the warrior master, making a startled noise of surprise when she embraces you instead. it is only afterwards, still riding the high and flush in your new knighthood on the boisterous exuberance of the still padawan alek half dragging you out for drinks, that you see your first master watching you from beneath the shadows of her hood.

* * *

you are a jedi guardian. you are a jedi knight. this is who you are, this is  _what_  you are, and this is how you define yourself.

you make name for yourself where you prowl through the galaxy, the dutiful and charismatic peacekeeper who refuses to back down or to hesitate no matter the cost or the danger. you make a name as an ascetic of the order, immersing yourself in the code and in the ways of the jedi.

they are your family. they are everything you are and everything you will ever be and you are  _happy_.

* * *

coming of age when you do means that you enter a galaxy teetering on the brink of an unseen war. you are twenty-three when they cut your braid - twenty-three when you venture into the wild far flung galaxy for the first time. when alek reaches his own knighthood a year later he joins you. together you stand side by side, shoulder to shoulder, the way you always have.

and you watch the darkness rising.

for years the mandalorians under mandalore the ultimate have raided and harried the outer rim, taken unaligned worlds and turned them into parts of the mando'ade war machine. the republic does nothing, the jedi do nothing, and people die. you are a new knight no matter your reputation, and so despite everything your instincts tell you to do you do nothing but watch.

the mandalorians take the outer rim world of taris; take taris's resource worlds for their own. they begin intruding on hutt space. the jedi council watches. the senate does nothing.

there are jedi scattered throughout the rim who do what they can alongside their assigned missions but the crusading army is as if on a rolling tide of unstoppable force - it is not until they begin to advance from taris that the republic acts. the navy blockades the mandalorians on taris for months, slows their advance for a moment; but they will not be stopped.

* * *

you stand before the council proud in your defiance. it is an argument that echoes through the temple's halls on dantooine, on ilum, on coruscant. those who would fight and those who would obey; the order's own battleground. you meet their eyes unflinching, stalwart in your own truth, and they tell you that you will not march and you will stay your blade.

the bite is there, bitterness like ash on the back of your tongue. a Jedi's duty is to be a peacekeeper; to protect the republic and save lives and the council would have you  _watch_  as men fight and die.

they have forgotten what it means to be jedi.

they call you knights, they call you warriors, and peacekeepers; they tell you you are tasked with the defense of the republic and her people and you will not stand idly by as that republic goes to war.

a peacekeeper is not a pacifist, he does not disavow conflict on the basis of its nature alone. a peacekeeper seeks to end conflict. and if that means the warrior becomes the soldier -

then a Jedi's duty is to  _act_.

 

* * *

  the battles of your youth  
**’cause this is _just a game_**

* * *

 

>  your name has never really been yours. 
> 
> the jedi have been the only family you have ever known, the only creed you have ever had written so deeply upon you that it might as well be written on your bones. the word  _knight_  is more a part of your identity that  _terrik_ ; because the jedi are the ones who have wanted you your entire life. but there are things more important than personal identity, than history, than self.
> 
> standing on the wreckage of cathar, on the beach where hundreds lost their lives to mandalorian guns, you swear that you will not rest until every last one of them has been brought to justice for the atrocities committed in the name of mandalore.
> 
> the mask hides your face. hides the grim set to your mouth, the hard edge to your eyes - and you forswear the man you had been.
> 
> you become  _revan_.

* * *

 

                                                           the seeds of darkness are there within you, even then.

 

* * *

the republic is all too glad to accept the help of the jedi knights who arrive with you in the wake of the onslaught. they have mobilized the entirety of the navy, sent the military to go toe-to-toe with the mandalorians, and it is war that rings on iron forged anvils and beats in time with the heartbeat drum of the galaxy.

war, you come to find, is where you belong.

the tide of battle, the intricacies of strategy, come naturally to you and the soldiers rally behind you battle after battle and step by blood soaked step. duro to serreco, from those first steps on cathar to the appointment as supreme commander of the republic fleet.

the mandalorians threaten everything you have ever loved and everything you have given your entire life to protect and you will allow them not one step farther.

no matter what it takes.

* * *

there is something beautiful about a battle. an intricate dance of blade and blaster work between those who seek different ends - be that the spill of blood like scarlet splashed on rocks or the desperation of someone backed into a corner. in battle, in combat, everything else fades away and narrows down to this singular focus.

the lightsaber is an extension of your body as natural as breathing.

you let yourself  _exhale_.

* * *

in a galaxy consumed by war it isn't hard to let yourself burn in the same flames. morality becomes a flexibly concept, the ways of the jedi that have so long dominated every aspect of your life slowly slipping away with each passing day. you will do whatever it takes to end the threat that encroaches ever closer to the core and to the seat of democratic power - and if that means sacrifice then so be it.

sacrifice millions to save billions. mercy shredded and tattered into nothingness.

the war drags on for three more years after you step into it on the back of the decade prior that the outer rim had been plagued. the mandalorians are dragged inch by inch away from taris and pushed back from the months of mandalorian triumph. you lead your forces alongside the other commanders in the counteroffensive. you drive them back at althir, at dxun and onderon. push them back into the outer rim and away from their coreward advance.

and then there is malachor v.

malachor v, where you callously sentence thousands of troops to death as easily as breathing. malachor v, where you annihilate a world with a zabrak's genius. malachor v, where your lightsaber plunges into mandalore the ultimate's chest and silences the taung forever.

blood bubbles to his lips as he rasps final words in your ear of the betrayal of the mandalorians and of the red skinned sith who appeared to them and promised them victory only to deliver them into destruction.

there is malachor v, that seals your fate as surely as you seal the mandalorians'. 

* * *

they will not rise again.

the mask of mandalore will not be returned, their armor and their weapons stripped and burned to slag, and the great clans of the  _mando'ade_  shattered and broken on the whim of your will.

damage runs too deep down to the core of what they have done and they cannot be forgiven and allowed to rebuild to the crusaders they have been and threaten what you hold dear.

the mandalorians are broken, and your smile is  _cruel._

 

* * *

  hide behind an empty face  
**don’t ask too much, _just say_**

* * *

 

with alek at your side the way he's always been, ever since you were children together on dantooine, you travel back to the outer rim following the words of a dying mandalore. you follow the trail from the barren world of nathema and then onward to drommand kas - long lost and forgotten by the republic.

arrogant, prideful and full of surety in your own actions and your own  _righteousness_. too much pride would be your downfall on the storm covered world, belief that you and alek alone could take on the sith emperor the way you defeated the mandalorians and do as jedi have done since the dawn of the first schism.

defeat the sith. battle light against dark.

it will only be later that the hypocrisy of it becomes evident to you.

months spent watching, mere mercenaries lurking at the fringes of an empire no one knew existed, watching with the hawk eyed focus of military commanders and coordinating your attack shoulder to shoulder with your sights set on the emperor himself.

it's almost ironic in a way then, how easily he breaks and bends your mind until you bend knee to him like so many of the others - he christens you  _darth revan_  and binds his command down to every heartbeat that surges in your chest. to take the republic; be the vanguard of the sith's destruction and grind them to dust beneath bootheel.

war is your calling after all.

* * *

planet by planet you unravel the trail of the star forge crafted by the ancient rakatan empire, until you crash down onto the surface of lehon and find yourself surrounded by the supposed long dead rakatans themselves. but the star forge is there and it is a thing of beauty where it hangs suspended over the primary star.

an infinite engine capable of crafting battleships and cruisers alike with minimal resources - an army's dream and an enemy's nightmare.

there over lehon you build your infinite fleet - staffed and crewed by those loyal soldiers who followed you into the unknown regions and are twisted by the forge itself and by their loyalty to you. they who stand at your back as you retake korriban to be the center of your power and of the sith empire themselves. they who would conquer a galaxy.

the emperor's command fades into nothing, twisted into a product of your own mind and into your own will.

* * *

hindsight is always full of clarity, as the saying goes, and looking back it is all too clear in its entirety that your fall began long ago, long before the day you set foot on korriban and called yourself  _darth_.

 

* * *

 it’s a beautiful lie, it’s the perfect denial  
**such a beautiful lie _to believe in_**

* * *

 

but it is yours. and you breathe out the power that sings through every vein and fiber of your being; and you will never go back.

you were a jedi once. believed in the code with everything you were and gave all you had with no hesitation or second thought.

you were a jedi once. until you learned better.

 


End file.
